Esther Kahn

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A Jewish girl in 19th-century London dreams of becoming a stage actress.A Jewish girl in 19th-century London dreams of becoming a stage actress.A Jewish girl in 19th-century London dreams of becoming a stage actress.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

6.7/10

1.2K

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

Awards
- 2 wins & 1 nomination total

Photos7

Storyline

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Did you know

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Trivia
Chosen by "Les Cahiers du cinéma" (France) as one of the 10 best pictures of 2000 (#01)

Quotes
Nathan Quellen: Because what has to happen, is that every step you take has to be more unbelievable than the step before. E-Every step has to be - well it has to have an idea behind it, an idea t-that is so complex, it would take, 10 philosophers just to decipher it. Each step has to stretch like a rope - in the audiences mind. Until they can't bare it anymore and they wan to cry out, "Careful Esther you're going to break it".

Alternate versions
Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival with a Running Time of 157 minutes (2 hours 37 minutes), which was then cut down by 15 minutes, against director Arnaud Desplechin's wishes, for theatrical release in France and elsewhere. The cut version essentially removes three scenes: a dream sequence of Esther, and two scenes fleshing out the Philippe Haygard character. The full uncut version was released on DVD in France and has screened in a few places such as the Lincoln Center in New York in 2019.

Connections
Referenced in I'm Still Here (2010)

Soundtracks
Suite algérienne
[by] Camille Saint-Saëns
Performed by Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo (as The Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra)
Conducted by David Robertson
courtesy of Naïve Auvidis

User reviews13

Review

Featured review

4/10

exhausting yet unconvincing portrait of the artist as young woman

The point of the vastly extended preparatory phase of this Star is Born story seems to be to make ultimate success all the more sublime. Summer Phoenix is very effective as an inarticulate young woman imprisoned within herself but never convincing as the stage actress of growing fame who both overcomes and profits from this detachment. Even in the lengthy scenes of Esther's acting lessons, we never see her carry out the teacher's instructions. After suffering through Esther's (largely self-inflicted) pain in excruciating detail, we are given no persuasive sense of her triumph.

The obsessive presence of the heroine's pain seems to be meant as a guarantee of aesthetic transcendence. Yet the causes of this pain (poverty, quasi-autism, Judaism, sexual betrayal) never come together in a coherent whole. A 163-minute film with a simple plot should be able to knit up its loose ends. Esther Kahn is still not ready to go before an audience.